The 57th Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan held an awards ceremony on the 21st, and the award for Best Short Feature Film went to Night Shift, a film that embodies Hong Kong’s anti-sending Chinese movement, while the award for Best Documentary Film went to Trek, which captured the six-year struggle of villagers in Wukan, Guangdong, China. The directors of these two films, Guo Zhen and Li Zhe Xin, are both young people from Hong Kong.
The Night Shift
After winning the award for the Hong Kong short film Night is Young, which tells the story of the “anti-sending to China” movement, Hong Kong-based director Guo Zhen expressed his solidarity with the 12 Hong Kong people currently imprisoned in Shenzhen through a message, adding that the film belongs to “Hong Kong people who embrace their conscience in every corner of the world.
He also said that the film belongs to “the people of Hong Kong who embrace their conscience in every different corner of the world.” Guo Zhen said: “We will keep this award for now and return it to you when dawn comes. May everyone heal well, rest well, love well, take care of the complexity of human nature, and then choose goodness and stubbornness. Finally, he wanted to say to the world: May freedom belong to the people!
Guo Zhen has long been concerned with social issues in Hong Kong, and his 2013 short film “In Exile” was nominated for his second Golden Horse Award. Night Shift is Guo Zhen’s second work that deals directly with political themes, following Floating Melon. The story has a simple structure, alternating between reality and fiction, with scenes of protests such as the road blockade during the anti-delivery movement inserted into the fictional plot, and lightly depicting the people and events encountered by cab drivers overnight. From the point of view of a cab driver, it presents a certain aspect of the big time.
Guo Zhen, 34, explains: “After completely stopping the feature film project last July, he, like many Hong Kong people, took to the streets and only started shooting Night Shift at the end of the year. He and his film crew drove around the rallies and demonstrations in a cab, sitting in the back of the cab while the cameraman sat next to the driver’s seat and secretly set up the camera. Around the corner from the crowded stalls, a large number of riot police confronted the journalists, with one police officer pointing his gun at the group. It was a scene that Guo Zhen included in his film Night Shift.
The film’s title is “The New York Times,” and its title is “The New York Times. He also lends out his cab for free in the movie. Guo Zhen originally wanted to find cab drivers in their 40s and 50s to help out, but fearing that most of them would refuse to participate for fear of getting into trouble, only Cai agreed.
The cab driver in the feature film “Night Shift” watches the live broadcast of “Apple”, but he also nags the young protesters not to cause trouble and affect other people’s lives; he has no clear political views, and on the one hand he complains that the protests affect his livelihood, but on the other hand he feels pity for the young protesters. The characters are based on ordinary people that we often encounter in our lives; from cafeteria owners to cab drivers, their political positions are ambiguous, but they are also somewhat bullying and fearful of evil.
Guo Zhen says that taking to the streets and walking with Hong Kong people is his way of participating in social movements; creating Night Shift, taking on the role of director, allowed him to enter a relatively calm and detached state, to organize and present some of his observations from the past year. He also says that he mostly shoots intuitively and has no intention of making a deeper understanding of the anti-sentinel movement through Night Shift. He even deliberately avoids thinking about the impact of his work or the repercussions for the audience.
Trek
The Best Documentary Award at the 57th Golden Horse Awards went to Hong Kong female director Li Zhe Xin’s Trek. This three-hour documentary was produced over a period of eight years. It covers the 2011 collective struggle of the villagers of Wukan, Guangdong Province, China, whose land was illegally sold by corrupt officials, and the process of electing a protest leader to head the village committee by democratic vote.
The election in Wukan triggered an experiment in grassroots democracy in China. The first half of the film, titled “The Struggle,” looks back at the roots of the incident and documents the villagers’ attempts to regain their rights to their land through protests and fair elections.
The second half of the film, titled “After,” focuses on the plight of the villagers of Wukan after their struggle. The director follows the key figures of the movement, including the wily movement leader Lin Bo, the passionate young man Ah Hong, who enlightens the villagers about the struggle, and Ah Xing, a teenager who returns to his hometown to join the struggle. Six years have passed, some people have died, some have left, some have stayed, some have been caught up in corruption, some have sought asylum in the United States, and some have rallied once again….
The grassroots democracy experiment in the village of Wukan, chronicled in the film Trek, was it the first bell for democracy in China, or a prophetic chronicle of the death of the revolution? What exactly is democracy? Is it a destination, or a direction? The issues raised by Trek are profound.
Hong Kong’s young female director Lee Chee Yan has long been concerned with the situation and choices of individuals in the midst of social change. Trek, her first feature film, has been selected for the 2019 Vancouver Film Festival, the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, and the Asia Vision Competition at the 2020 Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival.
He was also a member of the “National Film Awards”, the “Golden Horse Awards” and the “National Film Awards”.
I hope we can still believe in the power of records and imagination, no matter how lost the voyage before us.
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